Dec 20, 2005

SO, the hurly burly is done (the exhibition and all that leading to it) and now the new hurly burly is on... the EXAMS. yikes. catches me off guard every time, no helping it. We had a day long exam today. first lookup about the monuments the profesori put up on the board [mostly relating to the monuments made is remembrance to the atrocities against the Jews in WWII]. I got to read up on Horst Hoheisel's proposal for one that the German govt. wanted to be for the murdered jews of Europe. His proposal was to blow up the Brandenburger Tor (Pic). Of course the proposal wasn't approved (it was in fact approved after a long time of debates and thought, and two competitions), but here is what he planned:

1. Blow up the Brandenburger Tor2. Grind its stone into dust3. Sprinkle the remains over its former site4. Cover the entire memorial area with granite plates.

All the english articles/excerpts I found relating to this was by a profesori by the name of James E. Young, and here is what he said about it:

"Rather than commemorating the destruction of a people with the construction of yet another edifice, Hoheisel would mark one destruction with another destruction. Rather than filling in the void left by a murdered people with a positive form, the artist would carve out an empty space in Berlin by which to recall a now absent people.

...

How better to remember a destroyed people than by a destroyed monument?"

I thought this was really interesting, also it sheds a light on his methods if you also look at this work of his which he did earlier: Negative Form

Then we had to write our own proposals for a monument commemorating some tragic incident of the past, and also read this epic about Gilgamesh or some account of it and write another proposal of an artwork relating to something from it. And in between all that was a short/long interview with the profesori about the readings we had to do so far. So all this was from 9 am to 7 pm, and now I am very confused. We had no idea what the exam will be like, and I expected it all to end at 5pm, whereby I would go home and sleep, and start on the next exam after that, since my oral session is at 8, it would be well to be awake till that time. But now, I am confused.

And for some reason I remember the office days where we would change Asif's desktop wallpaper to some crappy dhaliwood actress' wallpaper with exuberant colors whenever he would leave his desk. Hahhaha... sorry Asif but it was a lot of fun! hhahhah